Animal-Farm

Book's introduction and Censorship in England

This was actually discussed years ago in an interesting essay by George Orwell, which happens to be the introduction to Animal Farm. Animal Farm is a satire on Soviet totalitarianism, obviously, and it's a very famous book, everybody reads it. But what people don't usually read is its introduction, which talks about censorship in England-and the main reason people don't read it is because it was censored, nicely; it simply wasn't published with the book. It was finally rediscovered about thirty years later and somebody somewhere published it, and now it's available in some modern editions. But in this essay Orwell said, look, this book is obviously about Stalinist Russia, however it's not all that different in England. And then he described how things work in England. He said: in England there isn't any commissar around who beats you over the head if you say the wrong thing, but nevertheless the results are not all that different. And then he had a two-line description of how the press works in England, which is pretty accurate, in fact. One of the reasons why the results are similar, he said, is because the press is owned by wealthy men who have strong interests in not having certain things said. The other, which he said is equally pertinent, is that if you're a well-educated person in England-you went to the right prep schools, then to Oxford, and now you're a bigshot somewhere-you have simply learned that there are certain things that it is not proper to say. - Understanding-Power (Noam Chomsky)